Appreciate Problems

Our natural tendency is to avoid problems, but they can be a blessing in disguise. If we think of problems as opportunities to improve or as puzzles to solve, businesses to start, or markets to win over, then we realize how potentially satisfying and profitable problems can be.

Scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and inventors love identifying problems because they stimulate creativity and lead to the most exciting breakthrough, benefits, and new businesses. Sales and marketing professionals are trained to look for the hassles, frustrations, and inconveniences that consumers experience because they know that when a business offers a solution to a common problem, consumers will beat a path to its door.

Instead of avoiding problems, we should seek them out and see them for what they really are – potential prizes to be claimed, and perhaps disasters to be averted. The bigger the problem, the greater the opportunity.

… and on a lighter note:

“Problems always appear big when incompetent men are working on them.”
– William Feather

It’s so much easier to suggest solutions when you don’t know too much about the problem.”
– Malcolm Forbes

“No one is more definite about the solution than the one who doesn’t understand the problem.”
– Robert Half

“The most important thing to do in solving a problem is to begin.”
– Frank Tyger

“A great part of this life consists of contemplating what we cannot see.”
– Robert Louis Stevenson

“The reward for being a good problem solver is to be heaped with more and more difficult problems to solve!”
– Buckminster Fuller

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
– Albert Einstein

And only George Carlin could say “If you think there’s a solution, you’re a part of the problem.”